An information technology (IT) service desk functions as the main point of contact between end users and an IT organization or service provider. Often, the service desk's goal is to restore service to and to fulfill requests from users as quickly as possible. However, best practices suggest that the service desk be given a broader role—beyond that of the traditional Help Desk—a role that spans the processes of incident, problem, change, and asset and configuration management. Organizations looking to adopt this approach using traditional technologies face the realities that these technologies are often not flexible enough to meet their needs, lack integration across the rest of their systems management tools, and do not deliver process optimization to match their efforts in adopting best practice approaches. Newer applications and platforms, such as those offered by the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), seek to overcome these difficulties.
IT management applications, such as Microsoft System Center solutions, help organizations manage their IT environments, from physical to virtual, across desktops, devices, and data centers. These applications are designed to provide a single window into IT services to allow proactive planning, deployment, management, and optimization across IT platforms. IT management applications capture and aggregate practical knowledge about infrastructure, policies, processes, and best practices so IT professionals can build manageable systems and automate operations to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
Because of the differences in various environments in which IT workers use IT management applications, IT management applications are often built as data-driven systems in which an IT manager defines various object types that have significance to the organization, roles for each object types, relationships between object types and so forth. For example, a service desk may have objects that represent service incidents, engineers in the service department, service contracts, and so forth. These objects may have relationships such as an “assigned to” relationship between a service incident and an engineer working on resolving the incident.
IT users in an IT organization often define new instances of objects and modify existing objects. For example, a service desk worker may open a new service incident that tracks the data associated with an issue that was submitted to the service desk. The service desk worker may also assign the incident to one or more engineers that will work on the incident, and associate the incident with a contract that defines the terms of a service agreement. These activities often involve customized business logic tailored to a particular organization and environment. Allowing users to quickly define simple and complex objects in management systems by starting with a common set of base values is usually expensive in implementation, and users spend time on this definition. Management objects are defined as complex hierarchal structures with intricate relationships between them that are difficult to maintain by end users. If an end user is given an unrestricted ability to create new objects, the user may not understand and adhere to all of the relationships that a particular organization has defined. For example, without some type of enforcement, a user could create an incident that was not assigned to anyone (e.g., lost in the system). The other alternative for organizations is to have custom code developed to carry out business logic, but this is expensive and approachable to a smaller audience.